Glass Half Full
by Nelras
Summary: Encarta Dictionary- kaleidoscope: 3. a complex set of events or circumstances


Sometimes his body feels wrong. Where have the defiant breadth of his shoulders and resigned paunch of his stomach fled to? Why don't his joints ache during the rains? His jaw hangs taut, beardless and full rather than whiskered, sagged and stern; his chest lays flat against his lungs where once it bloomed with potential motherhood; an unwieldy weight hangs at his loins, his hips thankfully narrow (Kiyoshi always banged them against overlooked corners growing up); his hair that always thinned so quickly up top and grown at a comparable rate on his chin and pubes now needs regular shaving above but embarrassingly little below his ears on down (the Avatar three lives before had been bald by twenty-three but well thatched at the nose and armpits). That his lower abdomen has never known the irritable cramping colic of cycles or the excruciating strange stretch of birth or the wonder struck connection of expectant mother to unborn child does not matter: memory knows well enough that he often has a double-edged awareness of himself, sensing things through masculine and feminine scrims simultaneously (Kataara often reflected upon his remarkable sensitivity to her moods and needs during their relationship, but she also harbored jealous suspicions about his equally remarkable comfort with the female body in spite of his professed virginity at the start of aforementioned relationship). The confused body-image forms a peculiar ego-boost: he is genuinely proud of his muscular control and balance in the face of such obstacles (it would be an exceptional feat even in a person without such barriers).

Matters of sexuality pose mind-bending dilemmas for him—and (during his infrequent bouts of ill-considered intoxication as an older teen) for his unlucky confidants—that no amount of rationalizing will solve (it'd be so much easier to claim he existed separate of his past lives, to be blissfully unaware of the differences in attraction as manifested on the foundation of female hormones and attraction as manifested on the foundation of male hormones or of the confounded relief at the realization that orientation in and of itself didn't alter love or his lives' perceptions of love nearly as much as their/his life experiences and personalities, but he can't in all honestly claim that). He knows that the issue will grow ever more complicated for him as his lives progress, hates such knowledge (oh, the innumerable crises barely averted with Sokka and spun straight into with Toph and Zuko), and still manages to find it useful.

His psyche tangles itself into confused contortions, cynicism and senility mingling willy-nilly with contentment and clarity. Guilt rails at righteousness, immature rebellion batters it head against hard-earned wisdom and negotiates sporadic truces with angst. He's a child now, but he has been a parent and had children and grandchildren and even great-grandchildren. On any given day he runs through a gamut of mentality varying from oblivious five to settled one-hundred to those frustrated in-between ages of seventeen, thirty-something, and fifty-something (each age recurring but never the same: hopelessness accompanies age forty-two as easily as humility or arrogance or nostalgia or forgetfulness or anything else). "Mid-life crisis" strikes him as a singularly inappropriate turn of tongue. Time paces baffled, defeated circles around him.

Then there are the memories of things he was comfortable with four hundred years ago but that appall his ever-shifting sensibilities now. In one life he had multiple wives, in another life he wedded a second cousin, and in another still he was the illicit lover of a _married_ predecessor of Iroh's (really, that's just awkward). He has been warrior, pacifist, politician, ambassador, artist, poet, dreamer, pragmatist, chef, caregiver, architect, scientist, scholar, philosopher, surgeon, revolutionary, reactionary, cautionary, weapons-maker, street vendor, captive, liberator, jailer, servant, royalty… Every single nation has in their turn declared him savior or outlaw: the Earth Kingdom tortured him fifty, twenty-six, eight, and seven lives ago; the Fire Nation abused him one life ago and again in this life; the Water Nation thrice executed him; the Air Nomads exiled him twice, executed him once, and five lives ago held him as a (well-treated) political prisoner. He has killed so many, many people in so many, many horrific ways. Disease, famine, war, age, idiocy, coincidence… they steal loved ones from him the way a river erodes mountains into canyons. He wakes jumbled up in the aftermath of nightmares he rarely remembers despite the fact that they're spawned by memories he _can't_ forget no matter how hard he strains to.

And yet…

Sometimes his skin fits perfectly. His shoulders are a familiar width and his stomach the expected washboard of a roving twenty-one year old. His joints don't ache during the rains because he is still a young man and this makes sense to him. His chin and chest feel _right _rather than ungainly; having a beard would be a pain; he ought to grow out his hair up top since he has it for once (shaving it won't bring the Air Nomads back). That annoying déjà-vu vanishes sporadically, taking with it his uncanny surety of the opposite gender's form. Some days he still rolls out of bed the wrong way, banging his shins against the wall, ego sinking under Toph's echo, "Nice going, Twinkle-toes."

Matters of sexuality are confusing for everyone, and at least after so much conflicting experience he can empathize better than he once could with bewilderment of any sort.

His psyche may be a lost cause on the organizational front, but he hasn't placed much value on regimentation in this current life and isn't going to start now. Besides, it's kind of cool to exist outside of time's puppet strings (it has mastery over the universe but it can't control one little-bitty soul in one little-bitty galaxy).

There are memories that appall him and forgotten nightmares that terrify him, but the memories have saved his butt (he doesn't repeat mistakes often) and what he doesn't remember is better forgotten because it obviously scared him. He looses too many friends, but he gains more each life; sometimes he even gets to keep them (strangely, Momo is the only one that ever has the same name; even the Avatar never has the same name twice). Kataara wouldn't be thrilled to know she was a boy once but it's a secretly potent amusement for Aang. He toys with telling Zuko that a few lives back he made the best peacekeeper Aang has ever seen or that Mai consistently died young and there's reason to suspect she will this time too or that he usually ends up being the least bitter of Aang's cyclic friends, but he hasn't yet (though the first and third enable Aang to keep going some days, and maybe Zuko should be warned about the second). And as for Azula… he doesn't think he'll inform her that she actually ruled the world some six centuries back.


End file.
